Can you hear this? Close-up of London Symphony Orchestra violinist. Photograph: David Levene/Guardian

Alex Ross's The Rest is Noise begins its sonic history of the 20th century on 16 May, 1906 in Graz, a couple of hours south of Vienna. Describing a performance of Richard Strauss's Salome conducted by the composer, Ross shows exactly why this was the start of something new. The opera builds and bends in unexpected directions:

At the climax, the head of John the Baptist lies before Salome on a platter. Having disturbed us with unheard-of dissonances, Strauss now disturbs us with plain chords of necrophiliac bliss ... Herod, at the top of the stairs, turns around and screams, 'Kill that woman!' The orchestra attempts to restore order with an ending in C minor, but succeeds only in adding to the tumult: the horns play fast figures that blue into a howl, the timpani pound away at a four-note chromatic pattern, the woodwinds shriek on high. In effect, the opera ends with eight bars of noise.

This opening and the 500 or so pages that follow it was all it took to give me a Damascene moment over compositional music. Music is alive in Ross's prose, mainstream and avant garde orchestral is exciting and provocative to me in a way it never has been before. His prose is noise, thrilling and elaborate, but also precise and semi-technical. He makes words that soar from the page into the ear.

The ability to successfully evoke other senses, in this case sound, is always the sign of something special. Thomas Mann's Dr Faustus achieves the same thing in fiction. At one point a small church in Pennsylvania is described, where a man simplified the notation of music to such a degree that anyone could produce beautiful sounds:

A faint legend had persisted down the years, sufficient in fact to make known how utterly peculiar and moving it had been. The tones coming from the choir had resembled delicate instrumental music and evoked an impression of heavenly mildness and piety in the hearer. The whole had been sung falsetto, and the singers had scarcely opened their mouths or moved their lips – with wonderful acoustic effect. The sound, that is, had thus been thrown up to the rather low ceiling of the hall, and it had seemed as though the notes, unlike any familiar to man, and in any case unlike any known church music, floated down thence and hovered angelically above the heads of the assemblage.

Writing well about senses is exquisitely difficult, as any music or restaurant critic can assure you. There are far too many turgid attempts to write about music, especially popular music, where pages are given to indistinct rambling about how spiritual Jim Morrison was, how drunk Keith Moon, how Eric Clapton's hammer-on changed music forever. But when it's done well it makes the words become something else, something tangible that retains the smells and sounds of what's described. I only have to look at the cover of The Mayor of Casterbridge to want some porridge, preferably with rum poured in, though it usually doesn't end with me selling my wife. Meanwhile, Nigel Slater's Eating for England is a little gem for writing on taste. Take his description of the humble digestive biscuit, which

always manages to taste of 'home'. It has a unique ability to take you to a safe place, to somewhere you think you remember fondly, even though you may never have been there. The smell alone, wheaty and sweet with a hint of hamster cage about it, is instantly recognisable as a good place to be.

And now, having dug out the book to quote that sentence, I am able to do nothing but retreat down the stairs to the kitchen, pop on the kettle, and reach for the biscuit tin.